11/08/2026
Hauʻoli La Hānau e Kumu Mark!
When Disney went looking for the sound of Hawaii, they did not find it in Hawaii.
They found it in Oakland, California.
Mark Kealiʻi Hoʻomalu grew up in ʻAiea and started dancing hula at 15. He trained as a dancer and a chanter with the Men of Waimapuna, the group of the great Darrell Lupenui - a hard-driving warrior style of hula that hit like a drumline, not a postcard.
In 1979 he boarded a plane to California. He NEVER moved back.
He taught in San Francisco first. In 1988, a couple named Bea and Herb Hew Len trusted him with their hula school, Nā Mele Hula ʻOhana, and by 1997 his California dancers had crossed the ocean to compete at the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo - the Olympics of hula. In February 2003 he opened his own school in Oakland: the Academy of Hawaiian Arts.
And in 2002, Disney called. For Lilo and Stitch, Hoʻomalu chanted "He Mele No Lilo" with the Kamehameha Schools Children's Chorus and co-wrote "Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride" - the two songs that taught the whole planet what Hawaii sounds like. The work earned him two Annie Award nominations.
Back home, the reception was colder.
Purists said he took too many liberties with the old chants. Judges critiqued him hard. The whispers followed him for decades: too different, too loud, too far from tradition. Too California.
He refused to apologize. "I come from a time when my kumu hulas said creativity, artistry and innovation were important and said develop your own style," he said.
But the wound underneath was never really about style. It was about belonging. More Native Hawaiians now live on the mainland than in the islands - and Hoʻomalu spent his life teaching hula to exactly those people. The homesick ones. The ones raising island kids in California apartments.
"Sometimes I think people back home look down on us," he said. "They're mistaken. We're not second-rate Hawaiians."
For nearly fifty years, Mark Hoʻomalu taught Hawaii to people Hawaii wasn't sure it still claimed.
He never asked permission to carry his culture. He just carried it.
Every family here has a video of a little kid dancing "Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride" in the living room - hands going the wrong way, face dead serious. That is his voice on the speaker.
Then came April 2025. Merrie Monarch, Hilo. Hoʻomalu opened his group's ancient-style performance with "Ka Wohi Ku Ka Moku" - the same chant the world knows from Lilo and Stitch - in a tribute to Queen Liliʻuokalani. And the stadium began to sing it with him.
"It was really nice because everybody in the audience was singing," he said afterward. "What a beautiful gesture to the queen."
One month later, the live-action Lilo and Stitch opened worldwide with his voice again - the first Hollywood movie of 2025 to cross one billion dollars. Forty-six years after he left, the sound of Hawaii in the biggest family film on Earth is still Mark Hoʻomalu. Still chanting. Still teaching every week in Oakland.
Today, August 10, he turns 67.
Some people guard tradition by keeping it perfectly still. Mark Kealiʻi Hoʻomalu kept it moving - through Oakland gyms, through kids born 2,400 miles from the islands, through a chant an entire stadium in Hilo now sings along with him.
Hawaii never stopped being his. Distance never got a vote.
